Yesterday I read a piece that broke my heart. It was written by three Danish researchers who investigate the relationship between democracies and covid responsiveness. Being Danish, the researchers studied Denmark (other European nations and the U.S., too), where, after the government loosened social restrictions because of vast progress in battling the disease, the number of cases "increased rapidly."
This resulted in the reimposition of restrictions. The academics' findings: "More than 90 percent of Danes support the new measures."
Why such a sane, Danish response to fresh social limitations by their government? "Our continuing research," they wrote, "suggests that Denmark’s performance up to this point is due to three important factors." Which are:
"First, Denmark has high social and institutional trust compared with other countries ... along with a high willingness to be vaccinated. Second, Denmark has a low degree of political polarization and misinformation. And third, the country embraces 'samfundssind,' a Danish word that loosely translates to 'community spirit.' While the country struggles to include every resident in this dictum, especially immigrant populations, Denmark is generally a trusting society with a strong communitarian ethic."
The Danish government did its responsible part by emphasizing transparency "through regular, nationally broadcast press meetings ... [which] shared coordinated messages based on factual information about the coronavirus while underscoring Danes’ moral obligations to one another."
All that, I hasten to emphasize, is not what broke my heart. Reading of Danes' institutional trust, their minimal political polarization and healthy community spirit was a refreshing, needed reminder that not all humanity is reckless, hyper-suspicious, politically rabid, socially atomized and nuts.
No, my heartbreak came in the blitzkrieging form of our increasingly pathetic fatherland, where all the above reigns. I began pondering when they didn't, beyond and before Trump's vicious insanity, before Bush's torture regime and unprovoked war, before Reagan's racial and socioeconomic divisiveness and Great Society warfare and hippies vs. hardhats and then beyond McCarthyism, which seized the entire nation in unrelenting fear and paranoia.
It had been some time since I had spent any time remembering the time when America was more like Denmark today: trusting, unified, bubbling with a strong, communitarian ethic. My time spent was fleeting. In the flash of a thunderbolt I remembered the "Good War," not personally, merely historically, from assorted written words — that is, more than Terkel's. Our Second World War, domestically, was the worst but oddly the best of times and indeed the last time when Americans behaved like adults.
I don't mean to romanticize war and dismiss its unsavory homeland effects. There was, because of government rationing, black marketing betwixt public and mafia; the usual Republican sniping at who I would argue was America's greatest president; the cruelty of Japanese internment; vestiges of German-American sympathy toward our European foe. And God knows nearly three-hundred thousand heartbroken families.
Also, however, there was FDR's straightforward leveling — today we call it "transparency" — with the public about battlefield setbacks, material deprivations at home and the loss of so many American service members. In his other voice, Roosevelt offered a realistic vista of wartime progress, as well as a better postwar planet.
Americans refused to despair; they balanced their sadness with trust in America's leaders, a wholesome reliance on hope, and an appreciation of the worthy cost of the war's deadly slog. They came together, by and large, through a "strong, communitarian ethic."
Juxtapose that with this small item about things quite tragic and big: a Steve Schmidt Twitter thread yesterday that caught my eye in its precise encapsulation of America's infantile crackup over what Denmark has handled maturely and sanely: the covid plague, where this post began.
"Overwhelmingly," he wrote, "[our] reality is the fault of three people. Trump, Murdoch and Zuckerberg. Trump is directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans because of his insanity." Murdoch and Zuckerberg then monetized and algorithmically exploited it.
The collective outcome has been a nation unhinged. The crazy is scarcely limited to covid, of course, but with that said, in Denmark, 471 people have died of this plague, while here, we're heading to 800,000. I did the math: Adjusting for lopsided populations, the body-count ratio is 0.000078:0.002.
And therein lies the immense heartbreak. Since the Good War's communitarian ethic, grounded in sacrifice, we have traveled from McCarthyism et cetera to a far uglier, more profoundly self-destructive ism — that of Trump's.
Clearly, America's rot goes beyond one man, or two or three, as I'm sure Schmidt would agree, once freed from Twitter's confinement. More than fair is to finger contemporary Republicanism at large – full stop. Its dyspeptic fits over Rooseveltism were nothing compared to its deep, chronic, modern sickness, corrupting nearly half the nation and rendering the other half despairing.
Whenever America's miserable, early 21st-century history is written with appropriate hindsight, taking center stage in our misery will indisputably be the Republican Party. It'll be no portrait of Dorian Gray, subtly putrefying away from public view, but rather a gut-wrenching series of America's most contemptible, publicly visible Kodak moments, courtesy the most unAmerican political party ever.
And yet, I for one do not despair, joining instead our stoic forefathers and mothers of the mid-20th-century. A mass of counter-confluences will someday arrive to exterminate the foul, fetid, burrowing stench of Trumpism. For here lies the deeper history of America: its stupendous ability to overcome even the mightiest of adversities.